Ah, the rude disturbances of mortality! I have a bone chip in my left ankle, a small drift of calcium unmoored from one of the dozens of bones in the human foot. Most likely I will have to have surgery. My therapist tells me that nothing more banal than getting older explains why what was once intact now floats in the cartilage sea of my ankle.
I've had to accommodate myself to its small but large presence. For two weeks my ankle stiffened, locked into place as my body tried to sort out how to work around this intruder. Eventually, it loosened, not with the gunshot immediacy of ice breaking apart in a spring thaw, but more like chilled thick syrup coming to room temperature. I've been getting foot massages twice a week, and every morning when I stand on my pins I test it to see if it's regained its youth; for the first half hour of vertical consciousness it reminds me of its default.
When I say I want my ankle back to normal, I am saying that I want my ankle to have no personality, no distinguishing characteristics, no attitudes, no voice in how I conduct my life. I want my ankle to become a machine again to do my bidding, smoothly functioning with minimal maintenance. I don't want a cranky partner, subject to unforeseen breakdowns. I want to be free to soar, and I can't if the vehicle to carry me aloft becomes balky, inconsistent, whiny.
But I do have this partner now, like it or not. I have to consult it as to how quickly I can charge up or down the stairs, how fast I can make it across the street when the traffic is running like bulls. I now have a sense of bodily geography: there's a fault in my southern latitudes. I now have architectural sensitivity: my foundation needs shoring up. No longer am I the cigarette boat running full throttled from point A to point B. Instead, I'm a tug boat tacking with the tides, trying to pick my way to port through shifting currents and fickle winds.
In working my ankle back to health, I've had to think about what "health" is. When I was younger, health meant assertion, like the figurehead on the bow of a clipper ship plunging through the seas. As I get older, I see that health has a lot to do with the rigging and how everything must work together to hoist the sails. There is no one way to do that, and maturity at least means knowing how to "jury rig" when the expected falls apart. So I've made my treaty with my ankle, letting it dictate what I need to do to keep the rigging intact and the sails full. The important point is to keep sailing, leaving dead water behind, turning anger into wind and disappointment into bearings heading for home.
* * * * *
Well, that last paragraph was a bit of poetry, that is to say, something of a cross between a lie and a wish. The ankle did not heal itself, and the only way I could "work it back to health" was to get an operation. I had never been in an operating room before, either as visitor or patient, and so, with iatrogenic thoughts in the back of my head, I nervously put myself in the hands of the ambulatory care center and my orthopedic surgeon specializing in "sports medicine."
I took a local anesthetic because I wanted to see and hear everything they did; as much as possible, I wanted to participate in the process and not be a simple slab of meat incised and buttoned up. (They cheated me a bit on this, slipping me a relaxant of some sort, so that the images on the television monitor, where the arthroscope met the bone, came across as blurry and MTV-ish; they also said I chattered non-stop, asking them questions and requesting explanations -- all I remember is a verbal blur.) As they wheeled me in, needled and numbed, I couldn't help but marvel at all the technology accoutering me, all this science brought to bear on a piece of bone that would prove to be no larger than an eye-tooth. At the same moment it felt like a bit much and very comforting.
I passed through the ordeal easily, sitting in my johnny during post-op, hand-held by a friend, slurping down juice and waiting for the cirrus clouds to clear from behind the brow. Then home to a bit of bed rest, a pair of crutches affixed to my armpits, and some thinking.
For about a week I joined the ranks of the physically "disabled." I quickly found out that what is called "the built environment," the urbanscape of everyday life, has been constructed for those with four working limbs. If you have three or fewer working limbs, the world, unlike what the commercial says, is not a very cool place at all.
Take stairs and doors, common everyday obstacles successfully negotiated. In fact, for a four-limbed person with sufficient body strength, these pose no problem, are not even thought of as obstacles because they don't obstruct anything. But architects have based door- and stair-designs on a stereotype of physical ability, and if you happen to fall outside that range -- say, a frail elderly person, a young child, a man on crutches -- doors and stairs become exclusive and dismissive. Rather quickly I saw that this four-limbed stereotype shapes almost everything we encounter daily, something I hadn't noticed when I had my four limbs. Equally as quickly I saw that automatic doors and elevators not only make entrance, exit, and movement possible, they also let people keep their dignity as they go about their affairs.
Keeping dignity -- not an easy task in a world designed for four-limbed people, a world that does not take kindly to infirmity. I went into a fast food restaurant to get a meal. The server put the food on my tray and then moved on to the next customer. How was I going to carry the tray? I had to ask another server to carry it, which he did cheerily enough. But for a moment I had been passed over. People saw me struggle through a door and did not offer help. People behind me in line didn't wait for me to put my purchases in my tote bag and move out of the way; they squeezed past me to put their items on the counter. Having three limbs seemed to make me both invisible and annoyingly present. Small indignities, easily handled -- but I had never had to suffer them when I had four limbs.
After my sojourn on crutches, I can understand why many likened the Americans with Disabilities Act to a Bill of Rights or an Emancipation Proclamation for people with disabilities. But my crutch time also showed me a deeper truth: We don't have disabled people but a disabled world. With the proper technologies inserted into the landscape, no physical disabilities exist. If all buses have lifts and all buildings have automated doors and all entrances have easily navigated ramps, then people who happen not to have four limbs can act as if they do. Technology not only democratizes access and restores dignity; it also re shapes the world so that everyone can perform on an equal footing -- even those whose footing, like mine, fell one foot short for a time.
(November 1995)